Welcome to Charity Navigator's Blog!

The team from Charity Navigator, the nation's largest independent charity evaluator and leading donor advocate, shares their thoughts on emerging nonprofit-sector issues and offers tips to better inform your intelligent giving decisions.

Wednesday, January 26, 2011

Our Ever Expanding Database

When we launched Charity Navigator in 2002, we rated 1,100 charities. Today, we evaluate, for free, 5,500 charities. These charities account for roughly 65% of the donations in America. Still, with nearly 1 million charities in existence, there are many deserving (and not deserving) ones that we haven't gotten to yet.

Many times donors will ask for a charity to be rated that is simply too new or too small to meet our criteria as in the case of the Disabled Veterans National Foundation. And sometimes a charity will meet our criteria, but due to our limited resources, the charity is pending an evaluation, such as is the case with the New Orleans Area Habitat for Humanity.

So, what do you do if we haven’t yet rated a charity you are considering supporting?